Okarun’s TRAGIC Childhood! Dandadan Chapter 252 Review!

In the previous Dandadan chapter, Okarun awakens as an oni, rampaging even against his own Family.

Dandadan Chapter 252 is titled, “Ken Takakura”

This chapter has 31 pages.

This is the fourth longest chapter in the series.

Chapter 1 is the longest at 67 pages, followed by Chapter 2 at 53 pages, and Chapter 3 at 40 pages.

Chapter 159 was the longest outside the early chapters with 26 pages.

Childhood: Abandonment

The chapter begins with Okarun as a child being told by his mother that she will marry someone who is not his father because she and Okarun’s dad did not even register to get married and he was growing tired of him.

The mother tells Okarun her new husband has two boys, one the same age as Okarun and another a year older.

We even see the new family as well, the ones picking up the faceless mother.

She offers to let Okarun join her but Okarun chooses to stay with his father since he was alone and he felt bad leaving him alone.

Yet deep down, Okarun wanted to join his mother’s more comfortable family life.

But even as a child, he already noticed that she clearly did not want Okarun to join her and she had a spring in her step once she left the Takakuras, indicating that Okarun was an unwanted child from an unplanned pregnancy and the mother saw not just the father but especially Okarun, the one binding them to an informal live-in situation, as burdens on her life.

This was his first heartbreak, representing by the breaking of an earthen mold.

His Father Was NOT Completely Bad

We actually see Okarun’s dad much earlier in a Nichijo Daizukan (Day in a Life) chapter from Dandadan Daizukan, a 230-paged visual dictionary created by Yukinobu Tatsu and released on August 4, 2025, containing a lot of information about the cast and world of Dandadan, as well as 11 2-paged omakes about specific characters, including Okarun and Momo.

We see that Okarun works part-time as a delivery boy, waking up as early as 1am, to deliver newspapers.

After work, at around 5 or 6AM, he eats with his father, who cooks him a basic breakfast of eggs and meat, as well as cooking rice.

This indicates that although the father does not easily make ends meet and even has to have Okarun work as a delivery boy, which eats up a good portion of his time that should be for sleep, he is still able to keep Okarun alive by cooking for him when they are around.

However, this flashback actually deepens and even outright introduces Okarun’s father better, as we only see a portion of the truth through a simple omake.

That being said, that omake reveals a lot as for almost all of it, Okarun is expressionless and blank, like he was at the start of the story.

But once he gets ready for school and meets up with Momo and Bamora, his expression brightens, showing that his real Family was with the one he found along the way and that is where he feels happy, safe and true to himself.

Bullying is Hell

Immediately after we see Okarun’s conclusion over his abandonment, the bullies begin beating him up and that was while he was still in pre-school.

These were physical confrontations that involve beating his face and pulling him away in all directions.

He goes home to a messy home, where Okarun is only left 300 yen for dinner money while his father is probably out somewhere, likely drinking.

Although he is clearly neglected, Okarun’s father had the decency to feed the boy in any way while he was either looking for work or venting his frustrations somewhere else.

While being chased by bullies, Okarun hides in a condemned hospital, where he finds an alien magazine.

Atop the ruined building’s rooftop, he points to the sky, as if seeking a goal, mainly wondering if he can be rescued by those from above.

This feels like someone seeking religious salvation.

He finds more of these magazines in the same ruined hospital building and has even made the spot a sanctuary, which his bullies find him at.

He stands on the roof ledge, hoping to be saved from aliens.

Walking home, beat up by the bullies, he finds his father on his knees before other adults, who refused to help him.

In his anger, the father destroys a large amount of furniture with a pipe, which results in debris and glass shards hitting Okarun as well.

He feels his heart break as he spends the rest of his formative years being bullied constantly, without a single friend to help him.

Trigger Warning: Suicidal Ideation

As a middle schooler, naked and thoroughly beaten for the day, Okarun stands on the same ledge, looking over the world that had done this to him.

He recalls four crucial things:

The perpetuation of his bullying: from being beaten up as a kid to being humiliated, stripped naked in middle school.

The sight of his mother’s happy life without him.

His drunk father, alone in a wrecked home, unable to properly interact with his son.

He wonders if jumping off, if dying, will save his fractured heart, the pain from its constant breaking making him cry as he imagines what he once had with his two parents still around.

The pain was enough to stop him from the attempt.

Dandadan has always highlighted the dark side of Japanese society: Turbo Granny’s protection of women a reminder of Japan’s intense misogyny to the point that trains (and the tunnels Turbo Granny protects) are seen as hotspots for sexual violence, Acrobatic Silky’s tragic loss of her daughter, the Family’s tragic backstories and now Okarun’s entire life filled with bullying.

Tatsu highlights the realities of poverty, the joy of a simple meal with friends after each arc, and to remind us that the things we can “handle” or take for granted, are never simple or wishfully leaving.

Bullying can lead to these dangerous places and it gets worse the longer Okarun lived his teenaged life.

A Vengeful Spirit

We see Hase in Kami High, telling Okarun to stop staring at him.

Hase is currently affiliated with Count Saint-Germain and the Black Paladins, wanting to use his newly-acquired yokai powers, to torment what was once an easy target for bullying, who inverted the power dynamic just from having unexpected powers he at the time did not understanding.

Okarun is in a dark place.

His alien magazines seem to be replaced with images of oni, the being he has become at present.

From a safe refuge through hobby interests to a dark, lingering thought, a devil offering him a way out through self-destructive power.

But this was something that had always lingered in him, the desire to kill his bullies, but it so happened that it comes with present-day context, including the power of the Oni Club.

Here, Okarun worries about becoming a criminal and be ostracized, never able to live a normal life.

That’s when his oni side emerges out of him, telling him that there is no point.

He should kill everyone.

No one left to judge of torment him.

His mother, her new husband, his kids, his father, his bullies, the people in school, his teachers.

Even himself.

Okarun’s dark thoughts wanted to kill everyone, including Okarun himself.

To exist where he can be at peace.

He was in the same place as Evil Eye, a boy who was caged as a sacrifice by the Kito Family to satisfy their Tsuchinoko yokai god that was keeping a volcano from erupting.

Evil Eye was treated as a mere object, unable to experience the life other children had and if anything, was tortured by the constant sight of other kids finding happiness.

Like the story of “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” by Ursula K. Le Guin, we see a child who is sacrificed to maintain the eternal happiness of others.

Okarun was in the same position, where his abandonment by his mother made her and her family happy, and thus became a neglected pariah, whose life had no consequence to others.

Evil Eye wanted to kill everyone out of a bloodlust from his tortured existence and Okarun had the same urge.

Had Okarun gone through the attempt, either in killing his bullying or falling off his old refuge, he would have ended up like Evil Eye, a vengeful spirit who would only be known for his evil reputation, not the boy who lost it all.

Natsuki Hanae’s Ken Kaneki and Ken Takakura

We clearly see parallels between Ken Takakura and another Ken, Ken Kaneki from Tokyo Ghoul.

To get the obvious out of the way, yes both are voiced by Natsuki Hanae and they develop distinct expressions (not so much Dissoactive Identity Disorder alters).

When Turbo Granny’s power overtakes Okarun, we see him in a depressed yet vocally honest state.

Although calling Momo  “Momo-chan” (instead of Ayase-san in Japanese; or “babe” in English instead of “Miss
Ayase”) help see the joke and gags behind the form, his suicidal expressions, of being tired with life, are all real.

The years of bullying clearly show and how much of his heart had already been broken to the point of having nothing left to keep it together by that point.

Much like Kaneki becoming a ghoul and thus a pariah of human society, Turbo Granny’s powers have enabled Okarun to vent but also explore a different strength to himself that allows him to protects the one person who reached out to him and eventually all the people who formed the Family.

The two Kens made choices to live with their parents based on a basic sense of empathy.

Okarun was a kind boy who felt bad for his lonely father but part of that could also be due to the dissatisfied homelife he always lived through.

Perhaps Okarun chose to stay behind because he already knew he would never be welcomed.

But without a clear paternal or parental figure guiding him constantly, he was left alone to fend for himself.

While Kaneki’s bullying was less emphasized, the impact of his mother’s philosophy of kindness and martyred lifestyle enabled him to bear the brunt of such bullying, protecting himself through the creation of a meek persona, emphasizing how Kaneki, like all people, were just blank slates creating masks of ego to be able to deal with the world.

Furthermore, Kaneki used his mother’s kind facade to shield his ego from the reality that his mother had abused him and

Both boys also found salvation in books.

Kaneki used books as a way to understand and perhaps build the persona of his father, who died when he was four years old.

Okarun found a discarded alien magazine and from then on, he began looking for aliens to save him and take him away from his misery.

Both were looking for people who would never come in order to take them away from a life that pushed them to the point of suicidal ideation.

Kaneki wanted to “die heroically” as a way to be needed, exactly like how his mother wanted, a psychological need built from not only a mother’s abuse and his ego sheltering but from his years as a half-ghoul trying to keep together the family he found.

Okarun wanted to die from the immense misery of being alive, from the abandonment of his mother and neglect of his father to the constant bullying invalidating his existence and leaving him no room for happiness or a means to make friends.

You can see why Natsuki Hanae was the perfect fit for Okarun, as he had the template of a darker version of the same character long ago.

The Light That Saved Him

Okarun only wanted to be alone in a world where his heart would no longer crack and cause him pain.

However, this same heart will always yearn.

That is why it cracks and feels pain.

And it is also the same heart that remembers.

Amidst the darkness of his oni self, this heart, just floating fragments of ether or earth, speaks out to Okarun with its lowest voice.

Telling him that he is forgetting something.

The oni Okarun tells this being, which he does not recognize, that the only thing that exists is his hellish reality.

However, the heart points out that his prayers were received.

Receiving the gospel (Good News) of the alien magazine led him to answered prayers.

Because his heart kept praying through the pain, his hands reaching out to nowhere; all prayers to the heavens for his existence to be heard.

That led to his first encounter with Momo Ayase.

Where she stepped in, took interest in Okarun’s love for aliens, and told the bullies to scram.

She was the first light in his life of darkness, the first friend who acknowledged his worth.

Can this memory be enough to sustain Okarun?

Can he be saved from himself?

Dandadan Chapter 253 will be released on November 17, 2026.

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